A Room with a View

few days after the engagement was announced Mrs. Honeychurch made Lucy and her Fiasco come to a little garden-party in the neighbourhood, for naturally she wanted to show people that her daughter was marrying a presentable man. Cecil was more than presentable; he looked distinguished, and it was very pleasant to see his slim figure keeping step with Lucy, and his long, fair face responding when Lucy spoke to him. People congratulated Mrs. Honeychurch, which is, I believe, a social blunder, but it pleased her, and she introduced Cecil rather indiscriminately to some stuffy dowagers. At tea a misfortune took place: a cup of coffee was upset over Lucy’s figured silk, and though Lucy feigned indifference, her mother feigned nothing of the sort but dragged her indoors to have the frock treated by a sympathetic maid. They were gone some time, and Cecil was left with the dowagers. When they returned he was not as pleasant as he had been. “Do you go to much of this sort of thing?” he asked when they were driving home. “Oh, now and then,” said Lucy, who had rather enjoyed herself. “Is it typical of country society?” “I suppose so. Mother, would it be?” “Plenty of society,” said Mrs. Honeychurch, who was trying to remember the hang of one of the dresses. Seeing that her thoughts were elsewhere, Cecil bent towards Lucy and said: “To me it seemed perfectly appalling, disastrous, portentous.” “I am so sorry that you were stranded.” “Not that, but the congratulations. It is so disgusting, the way an engagement is regarded as public property—a kind of waste place where every outsider may shoot his vulgar sentiment. All those old women smirking!” “One has to go through it, I suppose. They won’t notice us so much next time.” “But my point is that their whole attitude is wrong. An engagement—horrid word in the first place—is a private matter, and should be treated as such.” Yet the smirking old women, however wrong individually, were racially correct. The spirit of the generations had smiled through them, rejoicing in the engagement of Cecil and Lucy because it promised the continuance of life on earth. To Cecil and Lucy it promised something quite different—personal love. Hence Cecil’s irritation and Lucy’s belief that his irritation was just. “How tiresome!” she said. “Couldn’t you have escaped to tennis?” “I don’t play tennis—at least, not in public. The neighbourhood is deprived of the romance of me being athletic. Such romance as I have is that of the Inglese Italianato.” “Inglese Italianato?” “E un diavolo incarnato! You know the proverb?” She did not. Nor did it seem applicable to a young man who had spent a quiet winter in Rome with his mother. But Cecil, since his engagement, had taken to affect a cosmopolitan naughtiness which he was far from possessing. “Well,” said he, “I cannot help it if they do disapprove of me. There are certain irremovable barriers between myself and them, and I must accept...